Friends
As a man now viewing life through the lens of middle age, I must place faith in my brain to keep my childhood alive. And, as far as I can recall, it’s doing a pretty great job. There’s the big ticket stuff all stored away — riding a bike, learning to swim, passing exams, as well as all the embarrassing stuff I can evidently never forget — accidentally setting fire to a hideous orange pouffe, wearing a ‘girlie’ leotard for my ‘impressive’ role as a penguin in the school play, and leaving home for a new life in the garden shed.
There’s also a collection of memories that, as a child, I struggled to comprehend. Chief amongst those early memories, being the fascination of family members with Family Notices. Threads of long-gone conversations that start “Have you heard about…”, “I see that Joan…”, “What about Lillian’s boy?”…
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As a child, the law prescribes you an education and that invariably means a peer group, a group you quickly come to know, that you mix with, in the classroom, the playground, and the streets, houses and fields close by. As a child, you don’t understand that this is all a very rare state of affairs. The older you get, the more time passes, the more choices get made. Choices to study new things, to move away, to take on work, to find love, to start a family…choices that become your life’s focus and fracture and fragment what’s gone before.
It would seem, for most, barring family breakup, house moves and the like, you can maybe count on a good 10 or 15 years of compulsory education — a stable time when your world and the people around you feel like they have been and will always be around you forever. Teachers may rotate, a few may leave, some pupils may come and others will go, but this is pretty solid stuff, by and large, but, of course, with age comes the realisation that nothing is forever. It’s yours borrowed for the moment you’re living in and often shed as you grow your wings.
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As an adult, I now understand the lure of the Family Notice — the title itself an English absurdity masking the happiness and sadness of life’s great journey. In pre-Internet times the notice in the local paper that everyone read (and told tales of all the folk who never moved away) made perfect sense; an aide memoir for those hazily recalled names from your childhood and a way of satisfying the curiosity as to how those folk you spent so much time with actually turned out. But though I understand the purpose, I still have no need to read the notices (even though they’re now handily accessible online).
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In the early eighties, a peer group was thrown together and held together through primary, secondary and sixth form and on into university and employment, marriage, divorce, and kids. There were best friends in the mix for sure, but this group was more about shared experience, even survival. Thatcher’s Britain in the North of England (even a leafy suburb near playing fields, beck and playgrounds) truly serves as a textbook example of what we now politely call ‘different times’, times that served to bond the group together — never with words spoken or pact drawn in blood, just a recognition that these were your ‘folk’ and you were and would always be part of the gang. A belonging that you could and would pick up and engage with on your terms and immediately be thrust back into your rightful and well-formed place in the group.
With adult perspective, it seems rare for a fairly sizeable chunk of a year group to evolve their connection and social activities into midlife, to be sufficiently motivated to update the address book’s parental addresses and landlines to uni accommodation to rented homes, to add in the mobile numbers, the social accounts, and the growing collection of girlfriends, spouses, children, and friends of friends. But perhaps the kids sewn into the Northern earth in Thatcher’s Britain were made of sturdy stuff. Perhaps we were just lucky and ended up with some social butterflies who were really good at organising stuff and liked the occasional trips to the South (at least until most moved back to the cheaper North Lands).
Though interactions thinned, ebbed and flowed over the years, as folk concentrated on their own life’s story, an aligning of the stars would occasionally give rise to a shared social evening in Durham, a weekend camping in the Lakes, a chance to find out what was different but also to revel in everything that was the same, before being jettisoned back into your own life, with your own family, friends, with soul renourished by recounting of those anecdotes from summer nights spent playing along Blue Bell Beck or on St Clare’s School Field, a time of BMX bikes, being home in time for tea and The A-Team.
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This week I thought again about the Family Notices as an electronic grapevine befitting the modern age brought news from the group.
One of its own had died.
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Even with a mid-life lens, death still seems like a thing that happens to grown-ups, very old grown-ups. On Leap Year’s Day in 1992, my Grandma died. Grandmas do die. In 2006 my Dad died and the idea that much younger folk could also die was brought into stark relief. This week, the universe continued its teachings, grown men just five months older than me can also die.
That teaching leaves a patchwork of memories waiting to be sewn together. It starts the inevitable replays of conversations and situations. But, ultimately, it all boils down to the fact that there’s a family without a son, a son I sat next to at school, who I built dens with in the woods, and who had a Commodore Plus 4 computer when I had a Commodore 16, someone who despite our directions diverging, I will always remember and I suspect one day will write about.
Memories — the imprinted snapshots we take with us that help us understand ourselves through our actions and the actions of others — are powerful things. Those memories that seem insignificant often come to mind in later years and provide comfort or understanding. But this week I found some comfort knowing I was part of a group not reliant on Family Notices, part of a group that had a lot of the same shared experiences with someone that I’m proud to have known and call a friend.
